If you have been even a casual fan of soccer over the last few years, especially if you watched the World Cup in South Africa in 2010, you have heard the incessant buzzing of the vuvuzela. The vuvuzela is an obnoxious plastic Bb trumpet that sounds like the buzzing of flies or hornets. It has also been used for political purposes. So today, let us briefly talk about the vuvuzela.

The invention of the vuvuzela is cloaked in controversy. The term itself comes from Zulu, from the buzzing sound it makes, and the horn itself appears to be based on Zulu trumpets that are traditionally used to call assemblies [1] (see Numbers 10:2). Indeed, the vuvuzela appears to be a parody of such ceremonial trumpets to make an incessant buzzing sound like a swarm of insects that drowns out any other sound. Though pictures of horns similar to the vuvuzela appear as early as the 1870’s in paintings, a man named Freedie Maake claimed to invent it in the 1960’s, and has pictures of himself with his horn in the last several decades. Other companies began marketing the infernal horns more recently as the craze spread beyond South Africa.

Also controversial is the way the horns can cause hearing loss in others and block out all sound (including communication between players and coaches) in a given stadium. For some people this might be the ultimate “home field advantage,” but the fact that even nearly empty stadiums (such as for yesterday night’s World Cup qualifying match between Thailand and Oman) can be filled with buzzing from just a few hundred to a thousand of the glorified kazoos. For these reasons many teams and venues have banned the vuvuzela, ranging from the National Football League and the UEFA to the Anime Expo. Attempts to ban the vuvuzela worldwide in soccer foundered because of an unwillingness to “Europeanize” soccer and to encourage local African cultural traditions of noise and “excitement,” even if that noise seems to remind one of a demonic horde of locusts. Also, vuvuzelas can easily spread cold and flu germs to others, making them quite unsanitary as well.

Most interesting to me personally has been the way in which the annoying noise-making qualities of the vuvuzela have made it well suited for political protests, as it was used by protesters in London angry at BP’s handling of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico rig explosion, as well as by the pro-union protesters in Wisconsin’s recent political crisis. The connection between the sound of hordes of unholy insects through an African trumpet used for political purposes is an intriguing one, and I am surprised that more political and religious commentators have not commented on the connection between those elements.

At any rate, though, whoever created the infernal plastic trumpet known as the vuvuzela deserves credit for bringing to our attention a whole host of worthwhile questions including the need to avoid causing harm to others’ hearing, the cultural implications of musical instruments, and the political use of foreign and annoying musical instruments for the purposes of protest. It may not be the best sort of credit, but some credit is due for bringing these matters to our attention and connecting a few of the more annoying trends of recent times.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuvuzela